


Memento Mori

by orphan_account



Series: Memento Mori [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: And He's Almost 18 When It Happens Anyways, Consensual Underage Sex, Eventual Romance, Eventual Sex, M/M, Marauders' Era, Mentally He's 20 and Perfectly Capable of Giving Consent, Mentor Voldemort (Harry Potter), Mild Sexual Content, Minor Underage Because Harry Is 17 & Therefore a Wizard Adult, Name Changes, Pre-Marauders' Era, Professor Harry Potter, Sane Voldemort (Harry Potter), Secret Identity, Slow Build, Slytherin Harry Potter, Sort of Underage, Time Travel, tagged just in case
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-24 20:22:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16182491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In third year after the rescue of Sirius and Buckbeak Harry steals Hermione's time-turner, determined to go back in time and stop Tom Riddle from ever becoming Voldemort by killing him. But the time turner is only meant to go back a few hours at most, and when Harry tries to force the knob to go backwards the time-turner explodes, sending him in a free fall through time, until he finally stops in 1960, not far enough to prevent Voldemort's rise.Trapped in an unfamiliar time with no plan, Harry is forced to create a new identity and a new life in the past, with no hope of ever returning to the future he left. A few years later, he catches the eye of the one person he needs to avoid at all costs, but nothing goes as he expects it to.





	1. The Curse of Time

**_Memento_ ** _**Mori** _

_**Honey Latte** _

_**Prologue - The Curse of Time** _

* * *

He doesn't really let himself have time to ponder over the consequences of his plan.

Harry simply lifts the time turner from Hermione's neck as she's sleeping on a pile of text books in the common room, grabs his bag, and sneaks through the tunnel to Hogsmeade. It takes no thought, there are not even any close calls with Filch, Mrs. Norris, or anyone else for that matter. Harry's escape is startlingly easy, enough it would have given him a reason to pause and think if he were not too wrapped up in his own plans to notice beyond being relieved. Safely outside, no longer in Honeydukes basement, Harry adjusts his backpack and pulls out the stolen time turner, heart pounding in his chest rapidly.

This is it.

Harry knows Hermione wouldn't approve of this, him borrowing her time turner to go back to the 1930's to kill Tom Riddle as a child, but he thinks maybe Ron would. They'd both understand, he knows they would, but maybe neither would approve. Still, Harry has to try. He doesn't know what the future will be like when he's done. Hopefully he'll go back and change history, and he'll come back to a future with his parents still alive. If the time turner can take him back, chances are turning the knob the opposite direction will take him forward. He hopes. Harry is very aware that he may be stranding himself in the thirties.

He turns the knob anyways. He twists it until it stops twelve twists later, and Harry frowns, trying to force it further. Twelve hours is not enough. It wont let him do anything beyond killing Peter Pettigrew. The knob refuses to budge, no matter how hard he tries to force it. Frustrated, Harry slams it against the lamp post near him, and he feels the hourglass shatter, glass shards piercing his skin.

The next thing he knows there is an explosion of gold dust, and everything is swallowed in a spinning gold world.

\--

For years Hogsmeade had a legend of a golden ghost.

The first sighting was years before the school and village was built, a golden blurred person showing up and frightening a a group of four children who would later become the founders of Hogwarts. The golden blur came and went in flashes, sometimes staying around for a few minutes, looking lost and confused and panicked before being ripped back into non-existence with a scream. Most of the time it would simply be there for a second of two, flashing in and out of existence in the blink of an eye. As time passed, Hogsmeade and Hogwarts were built around this phantom, and it became a normality.

It continued to come and go for years, the subject of many mysteries and stories, until one day in 2964 the ghost stopped appearing. It was years before the ghost was declared to have finally moved on. Life, as it had always done, continued on as if the golden phantom had never been. Eventually, as the muggles discovered magic and the magically were forced to abandon Earth for another planet, it became nothing more than a myth, a legend.

No one ever figured out what exactly caused the phenomenon.

\--

He comes crashing down eventually, after free falling through a golden world for what feels like forever and only a few minutes at the same time.

He lays on the ground, panting and disoriented for a little bit, before forcing himself to stand and look at himself. His skin is no longer gold, just twisted jagged lines coming up from his left palm to his chest, like thorned rose vines or lightning drawn on his pale skin in shimmering metallic ink, solid as if molten gold were poured over his skin and hardened, but somehow it doesn't impede his movement. In the window of Honeydukes, Harry can see his reflection and he is startled. His right eye is gold too but very pale, and where his lightning bolt scar had once sat is now a bleeding jagged cut, like actual lightning down the side of his face, the longest line going down over his eyelids and through the golden eye, curving over his lips. He cannot see his old scar, the small child's drawing of lightning on his forehead completely covered by the new mark, as if his cursed scar hadn't reacted well to the magical explosion.

He forces himself to stop staring, instead focusing on his surroundings.

Hogsmeade looks largely the same as it had when he left, though it is now either sunrise or sunset instead of midnight, and Harry is almost positive it's the former rather than the latter. There is a newspaper in a trashcan near him, and he walks over to it and pulls it out. Assuming it is yesterdays paper it's the fourth of August 1960. At the very least he can assume it's from the same week.

Voldemort has already risen to power. His war started in the fifties, specifically January of 1952. He's probably around in his thirties, if he'd guessed Tom Riddle's age correctly from the diary, and he could have been sixteen or seventeen if he was a sixth year, maybe even fifteen, depending on when his birthday fell and how much time had passed at Hogwarts before his memory had been trapped in the diary. Harry sighs deeply. He needs help. He's stranded in time with no way home, and he can not complete his plan because Voldemort is already too strong now. He wouldn't stand a chance against him.

The ministry is pretty incompetent in the future, but Fudge hasn't come to power yet, he is elected in 1963, so maybe the current ministry is good. It's worth a shot, but how does one call an auror? For that matter, should he be going to Dumbledore instead? Harry doesn't know that Dumbledore would approve of the plan that landed him in this mess, not to mention he doesn't know if he even knows all that much about time travel, whereas it's almost certain that the ministry will know about time travel. He thinks Hermione said time travel was invented in March of 1960, so it's new, but it does exist. Maybe they can send him home. His golden eye and scar would be interesting to explain to his friends and the headmaster, but at least he wouldn't be stranded in the sixties.

Mind made up, Harry heads into the Hogshead. The bartender laughs at his question, as if he can't quite figure out what a thirteen year old boy would need with an auror, but he directs him to a table in the back anyways. The man sitting there is tall and dark haired with a face that reminds Harry a bit of Sirius, but also like Malfoy Sr. "Mr. Smythe?" he questions.

He looks away from the papers in front of him. "What's it to you kid?"

Harry decides being frank is the best course of action. "I need help." He starts. "I messed with a time turner, and now I'm stuck thirty four years in the past."

Smythe blinks once, twice, then sighs. He picks up his black coffee and drinks it all, then drops a few galleons on the table as he stands up and starts walking out, motioning for Harry to follow after him. "Alright kid, you've got my attention." he says. "But this is a job for an unspeakable. Way above my pay grade. Luckily, I know a guy, and he owes me a favor."

Harry blinks. He didn't expect it to be this easy.

\--

Harry regrets assuming this would be easy.

After going through a whole bunch of trials to prove his story's honesty, Unspeakable Keller Danes promptly informed him that time travel in the sixties did not include future travel. All attempts at future travel lead to people exploding. It sounded pretty horrible to Harry because the man had used the phrase _eradicated in an explosion of chunky red soup_ to describe it. Going home to his own time is unfortunately not an option, but Dane can help him create a new identity and live in the past, so at least there's that.

It only takes three hours for his new identity to be made. Harry is made to read it over and over until he can recite it. His new life is based around his old one, with a few minor changes. He's a half blood still, but his father was a disowned squib who took his mother's surname when they married, and he never talked about his magical family. His parents were killed this year, two months earlier, in a burglary leaving him without any realities because his parents were orphans, his mother orphaned as a baby and his father orphaned at eleven when his Hogwarts letter never showed, who'd met and fallen in love in the orphanage they grew up in. He'll be going to live in that same orphanage now that his fake parents are dead. The only other change is his birthday. It was the twenty fourth of June when he left, and fourteenth birthday is still thirty-seven days away, his birthday is now the tenth of September 1949. He is a little miffed at having to pass as an eleven year old but Hogwarts, unfortunately, doesn't accept transfer students, and his only other option was to go to another magical school in another country.

Danes gives him a potion to take a few years off even though he is small enough from malnourishment and he has a young enough face to pass. He supposes it would look a bit weird if he was the tallest first year, already halfway through puberty.

His name is the hardest part to remember. Harry chose it himself, but he wasn't allowed to make it anything near his real name. Nothing Harry related, nothing even close to James, nothing near Potter or Evans. No names beginning with H, J, or P; though in the end Danes lets him break that one. Nothing related to Black either, no star names, though his middle name does technically break that one as well, and no variant of black in another language. He sticks with Summers as a surname as a nod to his old birthday, Leo as a middle name in honor of his old house, and Percival as a first name, because he always liked the Arthurian legends and he can just go by Perry or Percy, both of which are similar enough to Harry that he can remember them well enough.

Just like in the future, Hogwarts starts on the first of September and ends the second Saturday of July. Fortunately, since the cut off for going this year is September 30th, same as in the future, his new birthday falls right on time for him to start Hogwarts immediately. Unfortunately, Harry only has a month to get acclimated to his new life as Percival Summers before he has to go to school. The Hogwarts letters have yet to be sent, luckily enough, since Dumbledore was having trouble with finding a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, and since the Ministry just assigned him one literally the day before he'd arrived, Harry is looking to receive his letter via professor by mid-august at latest, a week at earliest. This, of course, means he has no time to get acclimated to the times before he is being sent to live at the orphanage. With his identity made and remembered, Danes takes him to the orphanage to get him settled.

\--

Standing in his new room, Harry sighs. This is him new life, his new home.

The room is pretty bare. It has a bed in one corner; a twin mattress on an iron frame with no box under it, white sheets, a lumpy pillow in a dark grey case that matches the thin comforter. There's a desk, dark wood faded from age and a lack of polishing, with a lamp and a wooden chair. There's a dresser, where his new clothes now sit, bought second-hand by Danes so he had something to wear while also not sticking out by the obvious newness. He can see writing carved into the wood along the inside edge of the door over the handle. Curiously he reads it.

_T.M.R. was here._

The handwriting is too familiar for Harry to try and pretend it was written by anyone else. Voldemort lived here. Harry has always been an orphan, but knowing Voldemort was one too is saddening. Suddenly, as he brushes his fingers over the letters no doubt carved with the sharp tip of a quill, thinking how he really doesn't know much about Voldemort, Harry realizes what a mistake this was. He cries for the first time since arriving, not caring if anyone can hear him. He just lost his parents after all, as far as they know anyways. No one bothers him, not even to call him down for dinner, until it's time to turn out the lights.

Harry lays in his new bed, but he doesn't sleep the whole night. 


	2. The Past and Future (aka filler chapter)

_**Memento Mori** _

_**Honey Latte** _

_**Chapter One: The Past and Future**_

* * *

Without his parents or Voldemort or his friends there to distract him, the beginning years of his Hogwarts life pass far quicker than Harry had expected them to. He's eleven years older than his own parents, more if he counts his mental age. Voldemort has no reason to take notice of him. His friends are not even going to be born for twenty years. Harry has nothing else to focus on as Danes searches for a way to get him home.

Admittedly, to distract himself from his own problems, Harry throws himself into his school work with a fervor Hermione would probably be proud of, and Ron would be horrified by, and he lets the years fly by him in a blur of schoolwork and homework.He does join the quidditch team, as a beater, but he avoids showing off his seeker skills. He avoids divination, which is even more poppycock in this time period than it is in the future, and switches it out with ancient runes. Otherwise, his classes are mostly the same. The DADA teacher switches every year, either being killed, maimed, or simply leaving to avoid being caught up in the effects of the curse. His potions professor, a man called Slughorn, is about a trillion times better than Snape, and he invites him to his little club meetings. Harry goes if he's bored, because he likes the professor, and he likes potions, but he generally avoids it if he can.

He doesn't draw attention to himself beyond having the highest grades of his year. He doesn't make friends. He doesn't stick out. In a way he's invisible, in a way he never could have been as Harry Potter. He never knew what people were thinking of him when he was Harry, but he knows exactly what people think of Percival Summers. To them he's just a strange, smart, socially constipated, half blood Slytherin. To them he is no one worth noticing all that much.

No one has any reason to notice him, beyond the oddity of his pale golden eyes.

It's not the only change to his appearance that Danes made, making both his eyes a matching gold since it wouldn't let him turn it green. His hair is now straight and calm, still black as raven wings, but not the mess or style of his hair before. He has no need for his glasses anymore, and Danes made a few minor changes to his face, making his nose a little more upturned, softening his cheekbones, and rounding the shape of his eyes. The changes seem so minor, but they are enough even he has a hard time recognizing himself. The effects aren't permanent, he can release them any time he'd like in case he ever returns to his own timeline and old life.

Still, despite his oddly colored eyes, no one has any need to figure out who he is because Percival Summers is not an enigma.

This all changes in his fifth year, when his time starts to catch up.

\--

He boards the train to Hogwarts as he always does, sitting in the same compartment he sat in with his friends in the life he could no longer go back to, the one he's sat alone in since he'd started this new life as Percival Summers. He does as he always does, pulling out his school books and writing out notes for the school year as he's been doing since his first year. He's always one of the first people on the train. His ritual has never changed, never wavered.

It's why it is such a surprise when a group of first years come poking their heads in his cabin. Harry looks up, jumping slightly as they peek in, and they all stare at each other for a moment. There are two boys and two girls. Boy number one is most certainly Lucius Malfoy, and girl number one is just as obviously Narcissa Malfoy, though he guesses she's not a Malfoy yet. They look eerily similar, both with nearly white blonde hair and piercing eyes, though Malfoy's are grey and Narcissa's are blue. That said, they are obviously not related, despite similarities. Girl two looks a bit like Sirius, straight dark hair and cold eyes the color of steel. Boy two is not familiar to anyone Harry knows, with hair red as blood and brooding black eyes. 

"Er, hello?" Harry greets, and that seems to shake them from whatever has taken hold of them.

"Oh, sorry." Mini Malfoy says. "Everywhere is full. Do you mind?"

He gestures at Harry's feet when he says this, which are propped up on the opposite seat next to his open trunk. Harry debates for less than a second, then he kicks his trunk closed, drops his feet to the ground, and he lifts his trunk into the overhead rack. "Just try not to make too much noise while I finish this, and if anyone has a problem with me being half-blood, I suggest you leave now. I will not stand being insulted when I'm letting you stay in my compartment."

He expects them all to leave, at least Malfoy and Narcissa considering how they are in the future, but they stay. "As long as you aren't a mud-blood." Girl two says, and Harry notes how far he's come since he left his own time, because he doesn't want to hit the girl for the insult. He's used to the ways of Slytherins and Pure bloods by now.

"My name's Lucius Malfoy." the boy introduces himself. Then he points to each of his other companions and introduces them too. "That's Narcissa and Bellatrix Black, and he's Rodolphus Lestrange."

"I can introduce myself." Rodolphus glares.

"Percival." Harry says. "Percival Summers."

He goes back to his textbooks then, because the first years go back to doing their own thing. It takes him far too long to notice that Bellatrix is staring, but when he does he heaves a sigh as if he's known the whole time, and he turns to stare right back at her. "What?"

Bellatrix blushes. "It's just your eyes." She says. "I've never seen someone with gold eyes before."

Harry laughs at that, he can't help it. Rodolphus speaks up before he can formulate an answer. "Oh, I thought you were looking at his notes. They're very tidy." He points out, gesturing towards Harry's lap, where his color coordinated notes sit open for all eyes to see. "What kind of quill is that anyways? I haven't seen you dip it once and you've no feather."

"It's not a quill." Harry smiles. "It's a fountain pen. I guess it's a bit like a quill, but with an attached ink well. They don't generally change colors as you write, but mines charmed."

"Is a a muggle thing?" Narcissa questions with far less disdain than he'd have expected.

"In a way, I suppose." Harry answers. "A wizard created them but they are used by more muggles than wizards. I hear that the americans and the french have been converting to fountain pens because they are easier to write with. I just prefer them because I waste far less time."

Once more the compartment falls into silence, but this time it seems there is nothing more to talk abut for the rest of the ride. The first year mini-death eaters go about their own business for the rest of the ride, leaving Harry to take his notes and occasionally eavesdrop.

They separate when they get off the train, the first years to the boats to see the school in dramatic effect, and the upper class students to the carriages. Before he'd come here, Harry used to think the carriages were pulled by magic, but he's seen death and felt the loss many times in his five years in this time, and he knows better now. He knows he makes a strange sight to those who don't see the skeletal bat-winged horses, but Harry doesn't particularly care about it. Many people in this time have witnessed death first hand, understood it, and felt loss of someone close. Voldemort has only grown stronger in the short time he's been here, so he's not the only student who sees the thestrals anymore. Those who do see them don't usually pet them, but they never say anything about the oddity of him doing so. It''s just another thing that makes Percival Summers different.

The sorting takes place as it does every year, starting with the hat singing, ending with all the first years in their proper homes. Harry is not surprised when the four first years are sorted into his house. Life continues at the same pace it always has. Despite Harry expecting the world to change drastically now that times are catching up, nothing does. He finishes fifth year at the top of his class, he finishes sixth the same. The only thing that really changes is that people seem to know him now, maybe because of the not-yet death eaters, or maybe because he stops hanging on to the dream of heading home. Either way people seem to call on him more, invite him to things more often. He can't really complain about this.

Nothing really changes until the winter of his seventh year. The day he meets Voldemort.


End file.
